Fight for Democracy. Glenda Daniels
out the whole company. As Berger commented:
Considered in terms of concentration, this foreign investment was not a positive development from the vantage point of pluralistic democracy, in that in Cape Town and Durban the same company now owns both morning and evening papers. However, at the same time, the entry of international capital saw a noticeable increase in competition in the newspaper industry – even if this was only at the higher end of the market. It took the form of more vigorous competition by Independent titles with those of other groups ...
There were other changes regarding the trend in foreign ownership, he noted. The English company, Pearson PLC, bought half of Business Day and the Financial Mail from Times Media Limited (Times Media then became Avusa at the end of 2007). Partnerships with foreign investment also occurred in 1998, when The Guardian in London bought sixty-two per cent of the Mail & Guardian, which prevented the closure of the paper. Subsequently, in 2001, it sold most of these shares to the Zimbabwean newspaper mogul Trevor Ncube, still the majority owner and publisher. Another foreign ownership-cum-partnership occurred when Swedish group Dagens Industry bought twenty-four per cent of black-owned Mafube Publishing. Berger noted the irony that liberation in South Africa saw the death of the liberation movement’s media as funding dried up because donors felt the country was now ‘normal’. The small newspapers South, Vrye Weekblad and New Nation, met their demise in the early 1990s.
In addition to the above foreign partnerships and ownership trends, there were significant racial changes in ownership, according to Berger. He noted five main developments. Dr Nthatho Motlana formed New Africa Publishing (owned thereafter by New African Investments Ltd or NAIL) and in 1993 he bought the Sowetan. This was then bought by NAIL, a black economic empowerment (BEE) company. Second, thirty-four per cent of the holding company of Times Media Ltd, Johnnic, was sold to a BEE group, with the ANC politician and subsequent businessman Cyril Ramaphosa spearheading the deal. This group, the National Empowerment Consortium, consisted of: NAIL, the National Union of Mineworkers (Num), and the SA Railway and Harbour Workers Union (Sarhwu), precursor to the Transport and General Workers Union (T&G) which became the South African Transport and Allied Workers Union (Satawu). Third, Berger noted a partnership between Kagiso Media and Perskor in 1998 but this split in 1999. Subsequently, Caxton bought Perskor and took ownership of the Citizen. Then the Union Alliance Media (UAM), a subsidiary of Union Alliance Holdings representing the two major union federations, Cosatu and Nactu, each with over two million members at the time, acquired shares in media companies.
These were major changes in media ownership. Owners included blacks and workers, and were a shift from the old patterns under apartheid, of white, male, capitalist owners. According to Jane Duncan, in an e-mail interview on 17 March 2008 for an article I wrote in Enterprise magazine, ‘The media’s political and economic landscape’, this period could be described as ‘the golden season of diversification’. She outlined the three main shifts. The first was between 1994 and1996 when transformation of the media ensued with attempts to unbundle the three major newspaper groups which were owned mainly by the mining and finance houses. Attempts were made to introduce some level of black ownership. The second, Duncan said, was the financial crisis of 1996 which led to the introduction of Gear (Growth Employment and Redistribution – the growth strategy of the ANC under Mbeki) when ‘credit became more costly’ and ‘black empowerment deals unwound’. This then led to the third, the ‘reconsolidation of media into three big groups once again, Johncom (now Avusa), Independent Newspapers and Media 24/Naspers’.
The shifts that Duncan highlighted showed that as quickly as diversification took place the deals just as quickly unravelled. The government used the opportunity to call for measures to curb concentration while at the same time trying to muscle into the free space of the media. In the same interview, Duncan pointed to the ‘growing executive control’ of the media:
Government advertising is also used as a means of exerting political pressure on media; recently the government threatened to withdraw advertising from the Sunday Times newspaper after it carried reports critical of the health minister … The ANC is also investigating the setting up of a media tribunal to address the ‘deficits’ in the self-regulatory system, which may well lead to greater statutory control of the print media, considered to be a thorn in the side of many in positions of power.
As the story of the fight for democracy between the ANC and the media unfolds it becomes clearer how the ANC has used the concentration of media ownership as an excuse for its political subjections.
Media and democracy in South Africa
Using the conceptual tools of radical democracy and psychoanalysis my argument is that the trend of the interpellations against the media was based in ideology which is meant to mask antagonism within the ruling party itself: it deflects attention away from its own shortcomings by focusing on the media’s shortcomings. Evidence will be provided in the case studies to follow. These interpellations began with Nelson Mandela and became quite intense during Thabo Mbeki’s time as president. During Jacob Zuma’s presidency we see legal interpellations in the form of law suits against media groups and individuals, for example the cartoonist Zapiro, and we see the Protection of State Information Bill (which would impede the work of investigative journalists) and the proposed media appeals tribunal.
The interpellations began with Mandela and it is noteworthy that, while the first democratic president was not paranoid about the media, he too showed misunderstanding of the media’s role in democracy and assumed that because you were a black journalist you would necessarily be soft on the ANC and its flaws. To a group of Sanef editors, he said, in 1997: ‘While there are a few exceptional journalists, many like to please their white editors’ (cited in Rhodes Journalism Review 1997). It could be said that Mandela desired unity with the press, and expected it of black journalists. I argue that this kind of unity suggests foreclosures which are not ideal in a radical democracy characterised by heterogeneity, open spaces, and fluidity. Mandela’s statement appears to be an attempt to create hegemonic unity out of irreducible heterogeneity, and an attempt to hermetically seal off the multiplicity of space, but using race.
Mbeki’s first interpellations against the media were recorded by the journalist Mark Gevisser in his 2007 book, The Dream Deferred. He recalled how the ‘first volley’ by Mbeki against the press took place in 1994 just after his appointment as deputy president. In an address to the Cape Town Press Club he mounted a critical assessment of the media, accusing it of ‘harbouring a tendency to look for crises and to look for faults and mistakes’, an allegation that became his pattern, and then that of the ANC. Gevisser wrote that by September 1995 Mbeki was branding any media criticism of the ANC as racist.
The interpellation took place on two levels, one against black journalists and another against Anton Harber, former editor of the Weekly Mail. Looking at Harber, Mbeki said: ‘Now criticism and complaining is what I expect from him. This forum, on the other hand, has to see itself as change agent, and not just criticise. The message to black journalists, I wrote at the time, was clear: Roll up your sleeves and stop whingeing like a whitey. Get with the programme’ (Gevisser 2007: 644). In Mbeki’s understanding, or misunderstanding, of the media’s role in a democracy, he fails completely to recognise that the media is a relatively independent agent, independent from the ruling party and his rationale is that if you are black you will automatically heed the ideological interpellations of the ruling party. In other words, you will recognise that you are indeed an enemy of the people if you do not and you will begin to toe the line ideologically rather than report critically.
I would also argue, drawing on Mouffe, that Mbeki did not make a distinction between a legitimate adversary such as Harber and an antagonist; he viewed the editor as an antagonist, in the sense of not being supportive of the ANC’s programme of transformation as the ANC saw it. Mouffe disagrees with Carl Schmitt whose argument did not permit a differential treatment of conflict but could only manifest as antagonism, ‘where two sides are in complete opposition and no common ground exists between them. According to Schmitt, there is no possibility for pluralism – that is, legitimate dissent among friends’ (Mouffe 1999: 5). In this sense, Mbeki’s interpellation of Harber was Schmittean.
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